n the death struggle.

"Come back again!" cried Mr. Damon. "Bless my skin! I hope not! I've
had enough of bats--and mosquitoes," he added, as he slapped at his
face and neck.

Indeed the party of whites were set upon by the night insects to such
an extent that it was necessary to hurry back to the protection of the
nets.

Tom and Ned kicked outside the bat the former had killed in their tent,
and then both went back to their cots. But it was some little time
before they fell asleep. And they did not have much time to rest, for
an early start must be made to avoid the terrible heat of the middle of
the day.

"Whew!" whistled Ned, as he and Tom arose in the gray dawn of the
morning when Jacinto announced the breakfast which the Indian cook had
prepared. "That was some night! If this is a sample of the wilds of
Honduras, give me the tameness of Shopton."

"Oh, we've gone through with worse than this," laughed Tom. "It's all
in the day's work. We've only got started. I guess we're a bit soft,
Ned, though we had hard enough work in that tunnel-digging."

After breakfast, while the Indians were making ready the canoes,
Professor Bumper, who, in a previous visit to Central America, had
become interested in the subject, made a brief examination of some of
the dead bats. They were exceptionally large, some almost as big as
hawks, and were of the sub-family _Desmodidae_, the scientist said.

"This is a true blood-sucking bat," went on the professor. "This," and
he pointed to the nose-leaves, "is the sucking apparatus. The bat
makes an opening in the skin with its sharp teeth and proceeds to
extract the blood. I can well believe two or three of them, attacking
a steer or mule at once, could soon weaken it so the animal would die."

"And a man, too?" asked Ned.

"Well a man has hands with which to use weapons, but a helpless
quadruped has not. Though if a sufficient number of these bats
attacked a man at the same time, he would have small chance to escape
alive. Their bites, too, may be poisonous for all I know."

The Indians seemed glad to leave the "place of the bats," as they
called the camp site. Jacinto explained that the Indians believed a
vampire could kill them while they slept, and they were very much
afraid of the blood-sucking bats. There were many other species in the
tropics, Professor Bumper explained, most of which lived on fruit or on
insects they caught. The blood-sucking bats were compa